Imaginarius does not seek comfort.
It does not seek consensus.
It is neither elitist nor populist.
It is resistance.
Resistance understood as an active practice of thought and experimentation. A space where artistic creation embraces risk as a method, where failure is part of the process, and where imagination is not meant to lull us to sleep, but to wake us up. Imaginarius asserts itself as a territory of critical freedom, deeply connected to the city and to public space, where art and life intersect without predefined hierarchies.
Imaginarius is a living platform, a place where ideas are not presented as conclusions, but as open-ended experiences. The 2026 programme is structured as a constellation of ecosystems, a diverse range of proposals that coexist, contaminate one another, and are discovered through proximity rather than prescription. Within this territory, surprise is central. Irreverence is not an ornament, it is a language. Innovation emerges from the friction between different aesthetics, cultures, and scales. The city becomes a space of conscious drift, where the unexpected is given room to exist and where the encounter between artists, audiences, and territory generates new forms of relationship and understanding, nourished by a path built over time, yet never allowed to crystallize.
Imaginarius embraces diversity as a structural condition. Multiculturality does not appear as an illustrated discourse, but as a lived practice. Different voices, origins, and imaginaries share the same space, creating productive tensions, possible dialogues, and experiences of active tolerance. The programme projects the future from the present, addressing sustainability with care and responsibility, cities in transformation, and communities in search of new balances. This projection is grounded in an attentive reading of the path already travelled, able to recognise continuities while also identifying ruptures, limits, and new points of departure. It does not propose universal solutions, but seeks experiences that leave a trace, that remain in memory and in thought beyond the time of the festival.
Imaginarius is emotion, surprise, doubt, and discovery. It is a space where new questions emerge, where thought becomes freer, more attentive, more curious. It is where a voice is given to what transforms generations, without any urgency to become consensus. Imaginarius does not claim to be a solution to the world’s problems. It seeks to create the conditions to recognise them, to question them, and to imagine other possible futures, aware that imagining implies choosing, taking risks, and, at times, leaving behind what no longer responds to the present.
Time has shaped an Imaginarius generation.
A generation made of questions, shared experiences, and intersecting paths.
A generation that learned that imagining is a form of building.
But Imaginarius is not confined to a single generation. It renews itself with each edition, each encounter, each new question released into public space. It is within this continuous movement, informed by experience and driven by the will to move forward, that the festival remains alive. The next 25 years are now, in the way we choose to continue imagining together, knowing that it is within questions that all resistance begins.
Imaginarius 2026 in numbers
42 companies
200+ artists
16 countries
Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Germany, Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, United Kingdom.
39 performances
1 installation
125+ presentations
5 World premieres
23 Portuguese premieres
In three days, the world fits here.